A DEGREE OF THE SURREAL,

THE NOT-ENTIRELY-REAL,

AND THE MARKEDLY ANTI-REAL

About

1. The turbulent flow of air driven backward by the propeller or propellers of an aircraft. Also called race2.

2. The area of reduced pressure or forward suction produced by and immediately behind a fast-moving object as it moves through air or water.

intr.v.slip·streamed, slip·stream·ing, slip·streams

To drive or cycle in the slipstream of a vehicle ahead.

3. a kind of fantastic or non-realistic fiction that crosses conventional genre boundaries between science fiction and fantasy and mainstream literary fiction.

The term slipstream was coined by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling in an article originally published in SF Eye #5, in July 1989. He wrote:

"...this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility."

Slipstream fiction has consequently been referred to as "the fiction of strangeness," at the heart of which is a cognitive dissonance..

Slipstream falls between speculative fiction and mainstream fiction. While some slipstream novels employ elements of science fiction or fantasy, not all do. The common unifying factor of these pieces of literature is some degree of the surreal, the not-entirely-real, or the markedly anti-real.

Posts Tagged ‘Catherine Bateson’

I am the granddaughter of a book collector. He had so many books that when he married my step-grandmother, he had the side verandah of her family house, a house in Vaucluse where she had been born, closed in for his study. Then he installed Compactus shelving to hold his library of maritime and crime history. The steel tracks for this were embedded in timber boards older than he was.

When I stayed with them during the summer holidays, it was my delicious fear that one day he would fail to see me hiding in later letters of the alphabet. He’d swing the steel frames down to search for something in E – F and squash me flat. It would take days before I was found in N – P and then I’d slip to the floor, a pressed girl like one of the faded flowers I found in my secondhand Billabong books.

I am also the daughter of a secondhand bookseller. When I was six my mother, with my father’s advance royalty for a contribution to a book on Australian opera singers, bought Lloyds Bookshop in Brisbane. I grew up surrounded by books. Visitors to our house would pull up a carton of books to perch on. Books to be marked or catalogued piled up on the dining room table between Christmas’s. One year we moved a pile of these to discover a perfect reverse lace pattern in grey bookdust of the previous Christmas’s tablecloth. My horrified mother tried … continue reading